Science Fiction Studies

#95 = Volume 32, Part 1 = March 2005

At the end of his chatty, reminiscence-filled introduction, Jack Williamson
remarks that Doc Smith “was slow to adapt to changes in the field and his later
works were not so well accepted. Over the years his reputation has waned and
waxed again, as generations of new readers rediscover his inspiring dream of
future human greatness. We must imagine before we can act, and Doc should be
remembered among the pioneers that did the imagining” (ix).

He’s right.

First of all, we forget how timid much early sf was. The early magazines may
have seemed far out to mundane readers, and fans may have been attracted by the
thought of reading amazing and astounding stories full of thrilling wonder. On
the other hand, as Frank Cioffi’s Formula Fiction: An Anatomy of American
Science Fiction (Greenwood, 1982) points out, many early stories used
minimal extrapolation. The anomaly at the heart of the story had to be not so
much resolved as dismissed by the end. Smith’s Skylark of Space (1928)
helped sf to develop the confidence to get into action as fast as possible and
keep going. A trip to the moon was a major event in much early sf; in Skylark,
the heroes test their space ship by zipping around the moon offstage while
they’re preparing for an interstellar jaunt. If space opera, dealing with humans
who must confront vastness, has become an especially vital area of modern sf,
then Doc Smith deserves credit for helping readers—and prospective sf writers
such as Jack Williamson—to imagine how far they could go.

Smith also deserves credit for respecting the magnitude of ideas. It’s
difficult to appreciate in our time of bloated trilogies and endless series by
hacks determined to wring every word out of a notion, but some ideas do require
extra length and multiple restarts. We saw how Asimov looked at the
Foundation Trilogy and decided that there was more story to tell. It’s not
greed that keeps Larry Niven writing about Ringworld or Fred Pohl
returning to the Gateway universe. Considering that sf is based on
willingness to see new angles of old situations, it’s not surprising that a
writer might look at the conclusion of a story and decide that more could be
done. It’s quite possible that most sf stories don’t ever want to be over. Doc
Smith was one of the first to appreciate this fact. The Skylark of Space
had a perfectly satisfactory conclusion, and so does Skylark Three
(1930). But Smith couldn’t stop there; he added Skylark of Valeron (1934)
and returned to the series at the end of his life with Skylark DuQuesne
(1965). For most of his career, remember, Smith was writing when there was no
hope of the stuff appearing in real books, when “professional science fiction
writer” was a contradiction in terms. He wrote because he couldn’t stop thinking
of new ideas and their consequences: bigger machines, more powerful rays, longer
journeys to strange worlds.

In these and other ways, Smith contributed usefully to sf’s development. His
own development, though impressive, was limited. The Skylark novels
represent a type of sf that Donald Rumsfeld would enjoy. I’m not trying to damn
with faint praise. Smith was not a narrow chauvinist; his humans from Earth are
willing, even anxious, to respect any aliens who can acknowledge that other
intelligent beings deserve to exist. On the other hand, hero Richard Seaton
ruthlessly exterminates egocentrically intolerant beings who are so dangerous to
others that they can’t be allowed to live. Smith also realized that Dick Seaton
jumped to conclusions and needed to be restrained by his friends. Seaton’s
hunches are always correct, however, though he sometimes needs help in working
them out in detail. Today, it’s hard to believe in someone like this, at least
as a hero, but Seaton sincerely represents the early twentieth-century American
faith that nerve and native ingenuity could surmount all obstacles, that we
could make the world safe for democracy—and that perhaps, in WWI, we already
had.

People should keep Smith’s considerable talents and limitations in mind while
reading Skylark Three. Unfortunately, one other thing they’ll have to
realize is that this is not the 1930 text that so impressed Williamson. When
specialty publishers began resurrecting sf serials from the pulp magazines after
WWII, Doc took the occasion to rewrite his novels. Skylark Three was
revised in many ways. For example, the serial contained an epilogue that made
continuation of a suspenseful narrative impossible, as it describes a ceremony
centuries later, in which Richard Seaton, the 1469th of Earth, becomes Chief of
the Galactic Council. Doc had to ignore this inconvenient conclusion when he
wrote the next Skylark novel, so he simply omitted it from the 1948
Fantasy Press edition that is reproduced here. Choosing the 1948 text is
defensible, but failure to note the fact suggests that the University of
Nebraska either doesn’t recognize the difference or doesn’t care, a shoddy way
for a scholarly publisher to handle any literary text

After having finished Snake’s-Hands, I must admit I am not quite sure
what I have just been reading, nor, in fact, how to review it fairly. Certainly,
John Crowley deserves the homage that Harold Bloom gives his favorite
contemporary writer in the preface, and Crowley’s fiction is clearly worthy of
the “host of brilliant essays” by “eminent writers and critics” that the blurb
advertises at full sales pitch. (There is no denying, by the way, that quite a
number of the essays are brilliant and not a few of the writers and critics are
eminent.) At the same time, I miss some sort of plain introduction by the
editors, just to let me know why the various pieces are included, because they
are not all brilliant, not all essays, and not all criticism.

Generally, the seven sections of the book each deal with one work. Thus,
after Harold Bloom’s profusely positive preface, we find two items on The
Deep (1975), one on Beasts (1976), six on Engine Summer
(1979), four on Little, Big (1981), five on “shorter works and
overviews,” eight on the Ægypt series (1987-2000), and one on The
Translator (2002). Three bibliographies cover Crowley’s fiction,
screenwriting, and selected non-fiction. Finally, there are some brief notes on
the contributors.

Many of these selections are excellent. Adam Stephanides’s two pieces on
Engine Summer are well-argued, offer interesting interpretations, and
include good references (something which, unfortunately, cannot be taken for
granted about the texts in Snake’s-Hands). The combination of solid
scholarship and readability makes Brian Attebery’s “Time’s Great Work and
Strange Turnings” a delight to read, and John Clute’s reviews of Ægypt
(1987), Love & Sleep (1994), and Dæmonomania (2000) are not only
good reviews; they are thought-provoking, critically fascinating, and make you
want to read the books—again.

These are just a few examples of the many pieces well worth reading, and had
all been like them, I would have little problem recommending this book
whole-heartedly. Unfortunately, the collection tries to go in at least two
different directions at once. On the one hand, a number of generally
well-written critical texts are presented, analyzing and interpreting Crowley’s
work. On the other hand, several items simply try to relate the contents of the
stories. Examples of this are the timelines provided by the editors, for the
Ægypt series and for “Great Work of Time” (1989), very useful if you need an
overview of the stories but hardly critical essays despite the few notes
appended to the end. Nor are Crowley’s original synopsis for Engine Summer
and the interview with him about the Ægypt series critical material.
Interesting, yes, but, at best, an example of the author interpreting, as well
as, to a large extent, explaining his own work.

Several of the other contributions similarly give the impression of trying to
give definitive explanations of Crowley’s fiction, as if there were correct
answers. We are told where Crowley found the inspiration for this or from whom
he borrowed that. I enjoyed reading those pieces, but at the same time, they
seemed to close the stories rather than open them up. Occasionally, the author
was invoked as an authority, as if literary interpretation were some kind of
puzzle; once you are done, that’s it, let’s see how many points you’ve scored,
how many allusions you’ve gotten right. Other contributions perform much the
same analysis, but in a way that opens up the text. In his article on astrology
and thematic structures in the Ægypt series, Don Riggs accepts the
critical challenge of the rich and sometimes deceptive intertextuality of the
novels. Riggs manages to use other literature to shed light on the novels (and
create some shadows as well), but also uses the novels to shed light on the
world outside. Originally a paper delivered at the International Conference on
the Fantastic in the Arts in 2001, this article is one of the more intriguing
pieces in the collection.

Another factor adding to the straggly feeling of the volume is that the
selections do not share a common format for references (and some critics are
fairly lax when it comes to giving references at all), and I do wish that
references to the same work would not include conflicting information in
different pieces. Also, even if there might not be such a thing as a perfect
bibliography, some omissions are particularly glaring: while other reprint
information is included, it is not mentioned that “Snow” (1985) made it into
The Norton Book of Science Fiction in 1993, nor does it say that Little,
Big was reprinted in the Fantasy Masterworks series in 2000. The latter
strikes me as particularly peculiar, since its being out of print is repeatedly
bemoaned by various writers.

Partly, of course, this might have to do with this being Snake’s-Hands’s
second incarnation. About a third of the texts in this version were published in
a staple-bound chapbook in 2001, and a number of them had been published
elsewhere prior to that. In total, nine texts of about thirty had not been
published (in print) before. (More than half of the previously published texts
appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction between 1995 and
2002.)

Nothing of what I have said detracts from my enjoyment in reading
Snake’s-Hands. The selections all added to my own reading experience of John
Crowley’s wonderful work, and I would not hesitate to recommend this book to
anyone who has taken pleasure in his stories. They might not all be “brilliant
essays,” but they are all good reading.

It is about time we had an extended and serious examination of Gene Wolfe’s
work. It has been 18 years since my Starmont Reader’s Guide: Gene Wolfe
(1986) was published, and since then Wolfe has produced a great many important
works, among them the novel cycles The Book of the Long Sun (1993-1996),
The Book of the Short Sun (1999-2001), and The Wizard Knight
(2004; really a very long novel divided into two parts), as well as a number of
fine short stories and even finer novellas: “The Haunted Boarding House” (1990;
collected in Strange Travelers [2000]) and “The Sailor Who Sailed After
the Sun” (1992; collected in Innocents Aboard [2004]) stand out
particularly.

Everyone seems to be agreed (from John Clute to Brooks Landon to Gary K.
Wolfe) that Wolfe is one of the finest sf writers we have; but as glorious as
his work is to read, it’s difficult to write about. Complex plot twists that
form connections over vast terrains of chapters and volumes, combined with
wide-ranging allusions and vocabulary reflecting myriad bodies of knowledge from
ancient history to navigation, mean that few are brave enough to write
analytically about his work. Michael Andre-Driussi has performed an invaluable
service in such projects as his Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth
Cycle (1994) for readers who want to move beyond the rush of words and
action, beyond an intuitive grasp of Wolfe’s fiction, to something more
communicable. Even so, it remains for scholars to use this foundational work and
provide some thoughtful analysis.

Peter Wright has stepped bravely, but with only limited success, into the
breach by writing a clear and serious analysis of Wolfe’s oeuvre. His book is
divided into three sections (“Initiations,” “Investigations: The Urth Cycle,”
and “Conclusions”) and eleven chapters, each named for one of Wolfe’s short
fictions. Attending Daedalus provides very useful summaries of the
complex action of The Book of the New Sun cycle, and a very helpful
bibliography, especially of secondary materials (the primary bibliography is not
exhaustive). While I disagree completely with Wright’s theses, I am happy to
have this extended discussion of Wolfe’s writing and am reminded of how
satisfying and useful the author study is as a critical exercise.

Wright generously notes in his acknowledgements his “gratitude to Brian
Attebery, Joan Gordon, Gary K. Wolfe, and other delegates at the SFRA-25
conference in Chicago who challenged my stance and thereby helped me to
consolidate my argument” (ix). Sadly, we were unable to dissuade him, and I find
myself, after all these years (that conference was in 1994), still in
disagreement. What is Wright’s argument? The book has three theses: that Wolfe
intentionally obfuscates his meaning; that Wolfe’s intended meaning, permeating
all of his work but most thoroughly worked out in The Book of the New Sun,
is to explore the biological imperative of genetic transmission; and that all of
Wolfe’s work after The Book of the New Sun is meant to provide a gloss on
this purposely obfuscated exploration of the selfish gene.

The first thesis, that Wolfe deliberately obfuscates his meaning, seems,
first of all, unhelpfully combative. At one point Wright says: “Wolfe’s
intertextuality therefore enslaves the reader by coercing him or her into
exploring a system of connectives” (44). Later, he describes Wolfe as employing
a device (the use of a “subtextual story”) for “confounding the reader” (58).
Enslaving, coercing, confounding: these words put the reader and the author in a
hostile relationship from which it is difficult to imagine any understanding
arising. Second, however, is the assumption of knowledge of authorial intent.
Even if Gene Wolfe were to declare that he had indeed intended to enslave and
confound his readers (an unlikely scenario), we’d have to take it with a grain
of salt. Finally, the author’s intent is beside the point of the text we have to
examine. Authorial intent is also at the heart of Wright’s second thesis, that
all ideas in Wolfe’s fiction are subsumed to serve the higher theme of
biological imperative. Never mind how unlikely it is that Wolfe would intend to
subsume his spiritual themes to this theme, but it trivializes Wolfe’s numinous
stories to reduce their explorations of memory, identity, and spirituality to
mere metaphors for an aspect of evolutionary theory. As for the last thesis,
Wright manages to dismiss as supernumerary all of Wolfe’s fiction after The
Book of the New Sun. I find that unlikely in the extreme.

Let this book remind us of the value of clear writing, forceful arguments,
and close study of literary texts, even though it must also serve as a warning
against its peculiar critical hubris. Flawed as Attending Daedalus is, it
is nevertheless helpful in itself, and helpful as a signpost toward what else
remains to be done.—JG

Brian Aldiss’s talent for phrase-making has done as much disservice as
service to science fiction over the years. This is particularly the case with
his idea of the “cosy catastrophe,” which so elegantly summed up, and dismissed,
the generation of British science-fiction writers before Aldiss’s own. It is
hard to read the best works of John Wyndham or John Christopher and apply the
description “cosy” to them. Worse, by so apostrophizing a decade of British
science fiction, Aldiss gave the impression that it was a clearly defined era
set apart from the general flow of British scientific romances. In fact,
Wyndham, Christopher, and their contemporaries sat squarely in the middle of a
well-established and continuing tradition that ran unbroken from Richard
Jefferies’s After London (1885) through various novels by J.G. Ballard,
Keith Roberts, and Christopher Priest, at least up to Ronald Wright’s A
Scientific Romance (1997). The nature of the catastrophe, the tenor of the
work, the survival strategies, even the highlighting of class distinctions, are
all consistent.

This new edition of what is perhaps the most significant scientific romance
published between the wars clearly illustrates that continuity. Brian Stableford,
in a very good Introduction, points up the debt Fowler Wright owes to Jefferies,
and, as might be expected, is excellent at placing this work within the context
of the scientific romances of the period. If Stableford’s treatment of the
influence that Deluge had in its turn is somewhat perfunctory, it is not
hard to see how nature turning inexplicably against civilization, and a bunch of
middle-class characters struggling to re-establish what they can amid the
depopulated ruins, has found its echoes in Keith Roberts’s The Chalk Giants
(1974), Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex (1977), and Richard
Cowper’s The Road to Corlay (1978), among others. Deluge did not
invent the uncosy catastrophe, but as the Midlands sink under the cold and
implacable waves it is hard to think of a better exemplar of the form.

But let us pause at this point and consider this new edition (ah, Fowler
Wright’s discursive style is catching, and he does have a talent for digression,
often stopping the action at a crucial point in order to fill us in on the
background of a minor character). We are told that this is the “definitive”
edition, which is likely enough given that Fowler Wright made few textual
alterations between editions. Footnotes point out where the name of a minor
character was changed from one edition to the next, or where there has been a
slight tidying-up of the text (“normally” corrected to “nominally,” for
instance, though Stableford doesn’t specify whether this was his change or
something that Fowler Wright had done at some point). But one later edition, and
the text reproduced on the family web site, had significant cuts, and Stableford
makes no note of where these cuts came, which is a pity. Other than that, the
notes are all that is really necessary, though it has to be said that the text
doesn’t need much in the way of explanations beyond pointing out who Jack Hobbs
was, or noting that many place names are made up.

The Introduction—a succinct biographical sketch; an outline of Fowler
Wright’s career with particular attention paid to the genesis of this novel, its
success, and the subsequent decline of his literary reputation; and a placing of
Fowler Wright within the context of British scientific romance—is all one might
ask for. One might quibble that Stableford is clearly so close to and reliant on
the Fowler Wright family that his impartiality on certain issues of character
and career may be open to question. Moreover, where he notes, as he does
frequently, that the given dates for articles or reviews are clearly wrong, he
seems to make no effort to establish the actual date, or to check precise
wording or context. But these are quibbles at most. Anyone coming to this
Introduction is going to learn a lot that is valuable about the man and his
work.

We learn, for example, that Fowler Wright was fiercely ambitious for social
position, but always seemed to live on the ragged edge of financial disaster. He
appears to have been bankrupted at least once and to have avoided bankruptcy on
another occasion only because of the unexpected commercial success of Deluge
in America. This is a portrait of the middle classes at their most anxious and
most ruthless, and that is precisely what comes across in the novel. Like most
members of the middle classes, Fowler Wright regarded the upper class with
disdain, and the two representatives of that class who feature, briefly, in
Deluge are idiotic wastrels. On the other hand, the working class (here
indistinguishable from the criminal class) is nasty, brutish, and thick. The
members of that class who feature in the novel are mostly enemies of our
middle-class protagonists; they are inarticulate, driven exclusively by their
lusts, and incapable of coherent planning. As for lawyers—Fowler Wright’s
unhealthy financial status must have driven him into contact with those
representatives of the upper middle classes on numerous unwelcome occasions—when
they fleece the Earl of Hollowby they “would have considered it dishonest to
charge him more than the rate agreed by the trade union to which they belonged”
(152). By rendering the professional body of these legal thieves as a “trade
union,” Fowler Wright is neatly putting them on a level with the working class.

In this light it is interesting that the hero of Deluge, Martin, is a
lawyer, but, we are repeatedly told, an honest one. He has learned survival
skills—such as how to handle a gun—from the working-class murderers he has
defended; but at the same time, he is able to provide the intellectual
leadership that the good members of the working class so need in this
post-apocalyptic world. In a curious speech, when Martin first rejects and then
accepts their request that he become their leader, he tells them that he
dismisses out of hand all their conditions, all the things they want, and all
the arrangements they have so far managed to work out. And yet, for all this
arrogance, he is acclaimed by the mob. This is, in other words, a work riddled
with class snobbery, though Fowler Wright tends to disguise it with sweeping
pronouncements against all that we call “civilization.” We are told repeatedly
how unpleasant, unhealthy, unwise, or plain wrong were all the things that now
lie beneath the sea. At the same time, by the actions of his characters, it is
clear that what must be preserved are middle-class values.
With one significant exception.

Reading between the lines of Brian Stableford’s introduction, it is clear
that Fowler Wright was puzzled by the success of Deluge. He kept trying
to replicate that success in later works, with ever diminishing returns. I
suspect he believed his success had come about through the combination of his
literary talents and his over-arching vision of a worn-out society swept away in
a cleansing flood. I imagine the real reason for the success, however, was sex.
Stableford presents a very believable scenario: would-be author S. Fowler Wright
wrote a long, rambling, and possibly unfinished novel while commuting during and
just after the First World War. It was from that unfinished novel that he would
eventually extract the passages that became Deluge and its sequel, Dawn
(1931). The timing is interesting. Although he did not see action in the war (he
was 40 in 1914), Fowler Wright was recruited by the War Office and spent the war
and its aftermath working on the procurement and production of munitions. If not
himself a member of that lost generation, therefore, he was acutely aware of the
war’s devastating effects. The despair that marks his work, the disdain for all
that civilization represents, was a typical product of the post-war experience,
and would have found a ready audience. But more than that, the rejection of all
the values that had allowed the war to happen included a rejection of prevalent
sexual morality. On the one hand, this resulted in the desperate fun of the
Roaring Twenties; on the other, the sexual licence that plays such an important
part in this novel. This is not overt sex: Fowler Wright ties himself in ever
more baroque linguistic curlicues as he tries to avoid describing the human body
or any form of sexual activity. Yet he strips his heroine, Claire, naked with
obsessive regularity—though no one seems to remark on the fact of her nudity, as
if she is somehow invisible without clothes. Serial rape is the overt threat
from the brute working classes that drives the whole plot. And, in the end,
Martin is allowed sexual freedom without guilt; in a world with far fewer women
than men, both pre-lapsarian wife and post-apocalypse mistress choose to stay
with him in an unlikely menage. Forget the millions of dead (most of whom we do
not see), forget the hardships (no one here is really going short of any of the
necessities); sexually, this is a very attractive proposition.

The plot of Deluge is quite simple and filled with coincidences. A
minor tremor in the surface of the Earth causes much of the land surface to be
drowned. Martin, his wife Helen, and their two young children survive the
catastrophe but are separated. Helen and the children are rescued by Tom, a
miner who was once acquitted of murder, thanks to Martin. Tom desires Helen but
she is waiting for Martin to reappear. Martin, meanwhile, creates a safe place
in an old railway tunnel. He meets Claire, an athletic young widow who has just
swum thirty miles to reach this island. When Martin rescues Claire from rape by
Bellamy and his gang of louts, the two become lovers. But Bellamy is determined
to get the woman and lays siege to the tunnel. So superior are Martin and Claire
that together they have already killed Bellamy and many of his gang before Tom
coincidentally arrives to rescue them. Martin is immediately acclaimed leader of
Tom’s little bit of sustained civilization, but unbeknown to them a rival gang
has just set out to kidnap Helen. Eventually the plot brings Martin, Claire, and
Helen together so that Helen and Claire can decide to share Martin, and a new
sexual morality is born. Along the way there are plenty of exquisitely perceived
vignettes of the reality of survival and the details of everyday life after the
apocalypse; but these are mixed with an equal measure of splenetic invective
against the routine horrors of modern civilization. (Fowler Wright includes just
one footnote in this novel, which inveighs against the ineffectuality of
speeding fines.)

In other words, it is a novel that can, by turns, delight and infuriate the
reader. It is well written, in a languid, Victorian prose that can still rise to
moments of melodramatic action. It is, on the other hand, probably not a novel
that would be much read today: the stately pace would annoy many, and the
coyness many more. If it deserves its reprint—and I believe it does—it is
probably more for its historical value as an important milestone on the ongoing
journey of British science fiction, than for any immediate literary relevance.
H.G. Wells and other writers of his era produced works that continue to be read
today; Fowler Wright, I suspect, belongs to that rather larger company of
writers who are referred to today, but not read. This new edition is, I fear,
unlikely to change that, but it will provide a pleasure for those of us who, for
whatever historical or critical reason, do like to look back at the works that
shaped the literature we know today.